ABSTRACT
As the study of British cinema has proceeded apace over the past few decades, film scholars and critics have usually conceived of it as a separate and distinct entity from Hollywood. Accounts of the industry focus on the beleaguered production sector and its struggles against the Hollywood behemoth. The most celebrated film-makers are those who worked mainly within the native industry, and patriotically resisted the allure of the world’s film capital. The most noteworthy films are those with a style or narrative elements that set them clearly apart from Hollywood norms. British cinema, in other words, is defined in opposition to Hollywood and, with a few notable exceptions, the two are seldom seen to share common ground. However, it is not necessary to define British cinema solely in relation to film production, film-makers or even films. It can also include audiences and their cinema-going habits, experiences and preferences. This perspective opens up some new and overlooked avenues, especially with regard to the relationship between British audiences and Hollywood. Over the past 100 years, Hollywood films have been a staple of the British cinema-going diet, but we know comparatively little about this phenomenon. Have audiences also seen Hollywood and Britain in oppositional terms? Did they resent or enjoy Hollywood’s dominance of British screens? And what meanings and pleasures did they find in films made 5,000 miles away, in foreign settings and by foreign film-makers? These issues have been explored in groundbreaking studies of British audiences, including Helen Taylor’s Scarlett’s Women (1989), Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing (1994), Annette Kuhn’s An Everyday Magic (2002), and also within Harper and Porter’s wide ranging British Cinema of the 1950s (2003). But the study of British audiences, as cinema-goers and as fans of Hollywood films, is an ongoing project and one that requires detailed investigations of specific time periods and audience groups, as well as key films, stars and genres. Of all of the areas that might be taken up for study, the woman’s film raises
particularly compelling issues. One reason for this is that the genre is so closely associated with Hollywood, especially in a longstanding critical dichotomy that points to Hollywood as the embodiment of lowbrow cinema (characterized by lush production values, excessive emotions, escapist plots and a star system that valued glamour over acting) and at the same time heralds British cinema as a
middlebrow alternative (characterized by realism, social relevance and fine acting). We now recognize that these characterizations are highly selective, and that they were promoted by a particular school of criticism that flourished in Britain during the 1940s, but it remains little known just how far these critical values seeped into the popular film culture of the decade. Another reason for studying the woman’s film is that, for all of the attention that the genre has received in recent decades, its appeal to audiences is often considered in comparatively narrow terms. For example, Jeanine Basinger’s noteworthy account of the genre, A Woman’s View (1993), explores ‘how Hollywood spoke to women’ with the implicit assumption that the woman’s film spoke only to American women and not to men at all. This chapter seeks a wide range of critical and audience responses to the
Hollywood woman’s film in Britain, focusing specifically on Bette Davis, a star now inextricably linked with the genre, and one of her most popular films, Now, Voyager (1942), which is now held as a ‘definitive’ example of this genre (Shingler 2007: 152). It would be misleading, though, to imply that this star and film were chosen as straightforward representatives of the Hollywood woman’s film. For many, Davis was a serious actor rather than a ‘mere’ star and, far from being dismissed as a lowbrow entertainment, Now, Voyager met with some considerable critical appreciation when it was first released in Britain in September 1943. Indeed, this star and this film have been chosen precisely because they test the perceived boundaries between ‘quality’ and ‘popular’ cinema, between Britain and Hollywood, and between the cinema-going tastes of men and women. These boundaries will be explored by considering the opinions of a wide range of film critics, and by using audience surveys and commentaries that allow comparisons between distinct audience groups. Any understanding of Davis’s British reputation, however, must begin at a
more general level and in October 1936, when she arrived in London and announced that henceforth she would seek work as an actor there. At this point Davis had appeared in 25 Warner Brothers films within just four years. Her contract had a further three years to run, but she insisted that she would not return to the studio, charging that it had forced her to make too many films, to play parts unsuited to her, and to work unreasonably long hours (The Times, 15 October 1936: 4). She already had a reputation as a somewhat contrary star. In 1935, she remarked to the British magazine Film Weekly that it ‘pays to be a type in Hollywood’ and to ‘remain more or less the same little woman in every picture’ (29 March 1935: 7). It was clear that she had greater ambitions for herself, and her rebellion against Warner Brothers was a first step toward achieving them. Her complaints about Hollywood were likely to fall on sympathetic ears in Britain, and not only because she had chosen London as her new base. The popular film culture of the mid-1930s was dominated by Hollywood films, and articles about Hollywood stars were the mainstay of magazines such as Film Weekly and its chief competitor, Picturegoer. Although the films and stars were popular, the same magazines routinely derided Hollywood as an industry; it was resented both for underestimating the public’s taste and for
preventing the British film industry from prospering. The studio system was considered crassly commercial; a factory system that made films in the manner Henry Ford made cars. Davis’s rebellion was thus presented sympathetically by Film Weekly, which portrayed her as a victim of ‘the Frankenstein monster of Hollywood’ (19 June 1937: 12-13). Yet when Warner Brothers sued Davis and the case went to the High Court, the revelation that Davis’s salary reached £600 per week weighed against her. She lost the case and returned to work at the studio. Davis was not yet among the first tier of stars and her rebellion against
Warner Brothers did not significantly improve her standing. A 1934 survey conducted by the Granada Cinemas chain indicates that Davis did not figure at all among the ‘50 favourite female film stars’ (Bernstein Questionnaire Report 1934: 1). In Granada’s next survey, conducted in 1937 and after her rebellion, Davis appeared at number 30 on the list of ‘50 favourite female film stars’, but she also came at number 12 on the list of most disliked female film stars (Bernstein Questionnaire Report 1937: 1, 6). That Mae West, Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn and Jean Harlow topped this unfortunate ranking is revealing. A significant portion of the audience disliked women who played assertive, sexually aware characters, and Davis’s best-known roles, as a vulgar Cockney waitress in Of Human Bondage (1934) and as a fading, alcoholic actor in Dangerous (1935) fell within these parameters. Her struggle with Warner Brothers may have added to the impression of Davis as a career-orientated, defiant, independent woman. Certainly, a publicity campaign initiated on her return to Warner Brothers appears designed to soften her image. When Picturegoer told her ‘life story’, as a serial running over three issues, it culminated with her joy at seeing her husband’s name – rather than her own – up in lights on a marquee (13 February 1937: 24). Similarly, a profile in Film Weekly emphasized her happy marriage and her devotion to her husband, the bandleader Harmon Nelson: ‘The maid never mentions the name of Miss Davis; neither does the gardener, the cook, nor the neighbours. She is Mrs. Nelson at home’ (19 June 1937: 12-13). At a time when the most popular female stars were Norma Shearer and Myrna Loy – both known for playing genteel, wifely, dignified women – this was a logical strategy to improve Davis’s image, even if it was largely ineffective. It was at the end of the decade that Davis’s standing markedly improved.
Many of her mid-1930s films had been typical Warner Brothers fare: modestly budgeted, contemporary and rather gritty dramas such as the off-beat crime film Satan Met a Lady (1936), the prize fighter melodrama Kid Galahad (1937) and the gangster films The Petrified Forest (1936) and Marked Woman (1937). These were not star vehicles, and in fact Davis did not always lead the casts, which included Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, William Warren and other second-string Warner stars of the 1930s. Her turning point was Jezebel (1938). The story of a headstrong, defiant southern belle who comes to regret her indiscretions, this was by any measure a woman’s film. Henceforth, Davis only appeared alongside major male stars if the film was a lavish costume
drama – Juarez (1939) with Paul Muni, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) with Errol Flynn and All This and Heaven Too (1940) with Charles Boyer – but in the majority of her films she was the primary star, and she was billed above dependable but less imposing co-stars such as George Brent, Paul Henreid, John Loder and Claude Rains. Like Jezebel, her later films centre squarely on her character’s desires and dilemmas, as well as on Davis’s own performance as an actor. She is a young heiress dying of cancer in Dark Victory (1939), a selfless unwed mother in The Old Maid (1939), a vengeful adulteress in The Letter (1940), a scheming and reckless killer in In This Our Life (1942) and of course a neurotic young woman who finally breaks free of her oppressive mother in Now, Voyager. As Cathy Klaprat has observed, the alternation between virtuous and vampish roles prevented audiences from becoming bored with her films, while her ability to play women of different countries and centuries, and women with repellent or attractive moral qualities, demonstrated her range as an actor (Klaprat 1985: 375). It was a strategy that served Davis well on both sides of the Atlantic. Argu-
ably, though, her status in Britain was greater than in the United States. In popularity polls conducted by The Motion Picture Herald, she came among the top ten stars at the British box-office for six consecutive years, from 1942 to 1947, peaking in 1945 as Britain’s second-highest box-office draw (Ramsaye 1946: 784). This was a feat unmatched by any other woman in that decade, and it was significantly better than Davis’s record in the United States, where Betty Grable and Greer Garson outshone her in a parallel set of rankings (reprinted in Basinger 1993: 509-10). Davis’s appeal to British audiences may have stemmed in part from her continuing defiance of the conventions of stardom: she was regarded as a less glamorous and more ambitious actor than her peers. This was apparent in the number of films that she made, the range of roles that she took, and also in publicity that cast her as a hard-working and patriotic model of wartime femininity. Picturegoer noted approvingly that, when filming Now, Voyager, Davis came to the set and read her lines to co-star Gladys Cooper even when Davis herself was off-camera. Most stars, it was noted, ‘leave that kind of thing to a “stooge”’ (25 July 1942: 10). When Davis donned a nurse’s uniform and made a brief appearance in the combat film Winged Victory (1944), the same magazine printed a photographic still capturing the moment, and commented, ‘yes, the famous star, twice an Academy Award winner, became an extra the other day’ (1 March 1941: 3). The film Hollywood Canteen (1944) highlighted her participation in entertaining the troops before they embarked for duty in the Pacific. If Davis’s films and her publicity were especially appealing to British audiences, it may be because wartime exigencies were greater and had more of an impact on everyday life than in the United States. Certainly, the parallels between Now, Voyager and British films that portray wartime upheavals in women’s lives and circumstances, such as The Gentle Sex (1943) and Millions Like Us (1943), become more apparent in this context. It is apparent, too, in British publicity for Now, Voyager that defined the film specifically as one that offered Davis her most challenging role.
